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Before Cunoesse drifted into his life，before Cuno was still small enough to believe that things remained forever as they were.his father spent Sunday mornings stealing cars.
It was never out of violence or despair. He lifted a vehicle the way a man might unhook his coat from a peg: gently, with a craftsman’s certainty, certain the world would not object.
The cars were always beige or gray.colors that dissolved into the dawn traffic of Martinaise the way sugar disappears into dirty water. His father, a man of errant theories, maintained that an invisible car was easiest to hide. They would drive for forty minutes, sometimes an hour, curling outward from the waterfront factories into the suburbs, where lawns refused to sprout weeds, children played in streets that had not yet cracked, and sidewalks still dreamed of their original cement.
During these journeys his father never spoke. He smoked, and smoked until the smoke settled into the stolen upholstery. In later years that odor would stitch itself to Cuno’s sense of transience: the perfume of possessing something briefly, beautifully, before consequence arrived to collect its debt.
The restaurant was called Le Jardin Perdu, though nothing on its plates had ever seen a garden, and the place itself had never been lost. For three decades it occupied the same street corner under a red awning bleached to the color of dried blood, its laminated menus stubborn enough to survive the kind of revolution that once tried to unspool Revachol brick by brick.
His father ordered steak,though seared to the rigidity of a work boot. Cuno devoured golden fries whose crystals of salt winked in the faint suburban light.
These formed Cuno’s loveliest memories, though even then he knew loveliness was a cavity in recollection, a sweet rot that renders an otherwise unbearable pain merely endurable. His father drove him not out of love but out of a need to counterfeit normalcy, to impersonate, for a handful of hours, the idea of family, rather than two bodies lodged in the same collapsing apartment.
By dusk the cars were returned.they parked with ceremonial care three streets from where they had been lifted, keys left in the ignition, for by then his father was drunk enough to mislay details. They walked home through streets that knew their names yet pretended otherwise, past revolution’s rubble, past facades still pitted by the artillery that had once claimed to liberate Revachol.
Cunoesse’s arrival carried no more explanation than a stray animal’s. Last evening she was nowhere; by dawn she nested in the hallway outside Cuno’s door, drenched to the bone, muttering in a tongue he could not parse. Later he learned it was a dialect from Kohti Kalla, though how a Sulo child had drifted into a Martinaise hallway remained a riddle large enough to swallow any answer.
His father was drunk past the point of noticing that Cuno left the door unlatched, past the point of observing her crawl beneath Cuno’s desk, past the point of grasping there were now two children instead of one. Cuno was nine; she was seven. Her smile looked as if someone had once explained the mechanism of smiling but neglected to mention it was meant to convey joy rather than something more intricate and more frightening.
She spoke seldom, and when she did her words were half in the city’s lingua franca, half in Sulo. “Näkki,” she would murmur, “perkeleen vittupää.” Cuno understood none of it. It sounded like cursing reserved for moments when the world commits an unforgivable act against you.
Cuno taught her thievery, the only language in which he was fluent. He demonstrated how to pick the pockets of a swaggering drunk, how to weigh a wallet by the gait of its owner, how to cry on command to distract a shopkeeper. She learned rapidly, the way a creature already convinced the world had never wanted her must learn or perish.
On Sundays, once Cuno had stolen enough coin, they drove,not to Le Jardin Perdu, whose red awning had by then either shuttered or burned or vanished like every other enterprise in Revachol, but to a fast-food palace converted from an extinct bank. Marble columns still shouldered the ceiling, but the air smelled of fryer grease and recycled sorrow peculiar to places where people shelter when there is nowhere else to go.
Cunoesse revered fast food with the zeal of a recent convert. She arranged her fries into geometric mosaics, then ate them one by one; she sipped cola so carefully a single mouthful lasted an eternity. Cuno watched her with an unnameable feeling balanced between protection and fear, between concern for her and dread of what she might yet become.
Money was always stolen: from his father’s pockets while the man snored on the sofa, from the till of a corner kiosk, from anywhere. In Martinaise money spread like plague between bodies, and the only moral question was whether you grabbed it before the next pair of hands.
Cuno trusted neither heaven nor God nor the spectral forces The Whirling-in-Rags still pretended to dispense. The world, to him, felt mercilessly material, governed by principles as blunt as gravity and as complex as human self-deceit. Yet as he sat in a suburb’s McDonald’s, Cunoesse across the table erecting small architectures out of food, he could almost imagine another dimension slipping fractionally beside reality where such an absurd yet ordinary life was not impossible.
——
The detective arrived in mid-winter like a wound that would not cauterize. Tall, unkempt, wearing a tie that looked as if it had crawled through bombardment, layered in a coat that had not known laundry for weeks, he threaded Martinaise’s streets with the caution of a man negotiating with gravity, sobriety, and the basic question of whether living was worth it.
His name was Harrier “Harry” Du Bois, though the first time Cuno saw him he seemed unsure of even that. He was prying into the hanging behind The Whirling-in-Rags: the corpse had swung from that tree for seven days while the town pretended blindness, because to see meant to care, to care meant to meddle, and meddling birthed trouble.
Cuno hated him on sight: hated the idiot disco tie, hated the dragging gait, hated the bewildered gaze that studied the world as though it had mislaid the instruction manual. Above all he hated that Harry looked at him,looked at the child pelting the corpse with stones—and saw, beneath the filth, someone worth protecting in a quarter that had long abdicated such duties.
“Cuno don’t care!” Cuno shouted, but Harry only stared, hollow-eyed, with a recognition Cuno did not wish to face.
The inquiry sprawled across days. Harry and his partner, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi from Precinct 57, became fixtures. Despite instinct shrieking that these men were foes, Cuno watched. He observed Harry stumble, birthing disasters, yet somehow unravel cases; watched Kim shepherd the chaos with patience, competence, and a composure Cuno had never glimpsed in a police officer.
Then they did the irreversible.
Their motor car,a Coupris Kineema in regulation RCM livery—rested outside The Whirling, polished, official. One night Cuno and Cunoesse, soaked in amphetamines, felt colossal. They stole it. Cunoesse jimmied the lock with a bent hanger, fingers precise as a surgeon’s. The engine caught at once, and they roared through sleeping streets, past the church where the Indotribe woman preached to no one, past the sluice, beyond Martinaise into the wider world.
They halted at a suburban supermarket. Cuno parked behind the loading bay and—though he would never quite fathom why—dialed the precinct from a pay phone, reported the carriage’s location. Not from guilt or fear, but because Harry’s eyes had treated him as human; returning the vehicle felt compulsory, even if surrendering it meant forfeiting his bravest theft.
Three days later Harry, strolling with Kim, solemnly informed his partner he must have driven to that supermarket during an amnesiac spell,the only logical explanation. Kim nodded, skeptical yet accommodating, because that is what partners do.
Cunoesse laughed, bells cracking in her throat, and Cuno tasted a terrifying pride: they had fooled the pigs, committed the perfect crime, rewritten a man’s memory to suit their narrative.
Harry left after the case, the Kineema bearing him and Kim into destinations Cuno could not chart. From the doorway of The Whirling he watched the taillights vanish, and perhaps he missed Harry, just just a little, the way one misses fever once it breaks: the strange dreams, not the pain.
The next year the water thickened to ice. Martinaise decayed in slow choreography, Cuno’s father drowned deeper in cheap liquor and powder. Cunoesse grew older, something inside her ossifying, hardening until even Cuno felt unease.
She was always strange, but now she spoke of the näkki, the water spirits of Sulo myth, as though they summoned her. She spent hours at the shoreline, staring into the black water, and Cuno wondered what she saw there that eluded him.
She learned driving by watching Cuno, a knowledge absorbed like moisture. Small as she was, she sat on a cushion to see above the dash; yet her feet touched the pedals and her hands knew the wheel’s gravity.
On a Tuesday she stole a car,a shallow coupe pale as dishwater,from the church lot. Cuno was at school, pretending education mattered. He walked back to their apartment where emptiness possessed a different quality of silence, and found she was gone.
He searched for hours: the communist reading-room rooftop, the crawlspace beneath the docks, the bookshop’s rear alcove where they pilfered magazines. Nothing.
A retired man in the suburbs, guardian of a forlorn pond, witnessed a child driving a too-big car off the road into water, the vehicle gliding downward, reclaiming its aquatic womb. Police dragged it forty minutes later; she was still belted to the seat, eyes open, studying something only she could perceive.
The officer who phoned was Jean Vicquemare of the 41st. His voice was a door closing yet tender. Arriving at the apartment, seeing one child collapse into two, he comprehended instantly the lone reality. Cuno’s father lay unconscious amid bottles. Jean did not bother waking him. He told Cuno, softly, “You can’t stay here.”
“Cuno’s fine,” the boy croaked, and they both pretended not to hear the tremor.
“No,” Jean said, void of judgment.
That night he moved Cuno to a collective residence for children of fallen officers—a Cadet Programme dorm the RCM kept in Jamrock. Jean admitted he lacked the health to be a guardian, burdened by clinical depression; still, he could escort the boy to a place where broken children were understood.
Cuno hated it: the rules, the therapy, the masquerade of importance. Yet Jean kept showing up—not daily, not weekly, but often enough that absence felt abnormal. Sometimes he took Cuno on patrol, demonstrating that not every cop resembled the corrupt husks of Martinaise.
Jean had served long before Harry’s breakdown. He was worn, grief-bitten, kept upright by antidepressants. He offered no sermons, no false hope, just the model of a man still functioning amid persistent darkness.
Six months after Cunoesse’s death, Jean drove Cuno to that same fast-food sanctuary. Jean bought fries and did not ask why the boy wept in the parking lot.
“Ever think of becoming a cop?” Jean asked once Cuno’s tears retreated behind habit.
Cuno laughed without mirth. “Why the fuck would Cuno want to be a pig?”
“I don’t know,” Jean replied, lighting a cigarette.
“She wasn’t my friend,” Cuno whispered. “She was…” Words failed: sister, burden, the soul he failed to shield.
“She was someone you loved,” Jean said. “Now she’s gone. You decide what that means. It can destroy you, or you can wield it.”
“How?”
“Up to you. The RCM runs a Cadet Programme for training, schooling, and a path to junior officership. I can introduce you.”
“Why in hell would you?”
“Because Harry mentioned you,” Jean said. “Said there was a kid sharp enough to steal a police carriage and return it undetected, sharp enough to stay alive in a quarter that wants children dead. He thought you had a promise.”
“Harry’s a mess.”
“Indeed,” Jean agreed. “But he sees through people, even when he can’t see himself.”
Cuno joined, not out of faith but because the alternative was to linger in limbo until adulthood and then where? Back to the corpse of Martinaise, to a father’s ghost?
The programme was slow: school by day, drills twice a week，procedure, fitness, report writing. Monotonous, which was precisely the medicine Cuno would never admit he needed.
Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. At fifteen his father died，liver, heart, or perhaps mere attrition. Jean arranged the funeral: six attendees, a coffin cheaper than a used car. Cuno felt nothing, as predicted; the man had been dead in every vital sense for years.
He kept the ash urn on a shelf beside relics from Martinaise: a comic book, a candid photo of himself and Cunoesse in McDonald’s. Little else deserved preservation.
Jean kept visiting, taking him on rounds, unveiling the daily mechanics of policing. Gradually Cuno allowed the thought that maybe impossible things were possible: that he could wear the badge without rotting inside.
At seventeen he sat the academy exams a year early, scoring improbably high. Martinaise had taught him skills no curriculum could: how to read eyes, how to smell lies, how to stand calm while the world corroded.
Academy lasted six months: calisthenics, psych drills, the curated fiction that justice is a machine that hums if regulations are respected. He excelled in fieldwork—firearms, pursuit driving, close-quarter restraint—stumbled through jurisprudence, but passed. At eighteen he received his shield and posted to Jamrock’s 57th.
A year of arrests, paperwork, boredom lanced by terror. At nineteen Jean leveraged favors and transferred him to the 41st, youngest officer on record. In corridors soaked with stale coffee and older regrets, Jean guided him past detectives half invisible in their own fugue.
Kim Kitsuragi did not at first recall him; years ago Cuno had been a foul-mouthed urchin chucking stones at decay. When Cuno introduced himself, Kim’s eyes mapped the transformation. “You’ve come a long way,” the lieutenant said, his voice the purest compliment he could muster.
They occasionally worked cases. Kim’s method—a horologist piecing together a watch—taught Cuno more than six months of academy catechism. Good police work is patience; procedure is holy only because it works; dignity distinguishes officers from armed thugns.
At night Kim spoke of Harry: brilliant, elusive, a man who solved impossible riddles and with identical precision ruined himself. The Martinaise case was both triumph and undoing, yet somehow Harry wrestled back sobriety and sought redemption in earnest.
“He asks about you," Kim admitted during a graveyard shift.
“What do you tell him?”
“I didn’t know, until now. I think he’ll be glad.”
They found him a desk whose previous owner had evaporated. Cuno wrote reports, answered phones, discovered most policing was waiting—waiting for crime, for witnesses, for the molasses of justice.
A week later he met Harry in the flesh, a man reconstructed without instructions, tiptoeing through familiar corridors. Harry saw him and recognition flared like a struck match.
“The car thief,” Harry said.
“The amnesiac,” Cuno answered.
Cases tangled,stolen narcotics linking three precincts, a corpse marinating in a tenement, a revenge assault decades in gestation. Crime in Revachol possessed mythic logic; each act of violence tethered invisibly to a dozen others.
At twenty they chased a missing-girl case. Geography elected Cuno that Martinaise eats children. Harry, Kim, and Cuno walked every alley until he soon located her in a fisherman’s cellar，found as one finds a specific shadow in a pitch-black room. The kidnapper wore an ordinary face, which was the terror. They processed him by the book, watched twenty years of bars descend, knowing nothing could annul what he had done.
Afterward Harry nursed soda in a bar booth stained by generations of confessions; Cuno sipped beer he did not desire.
“You wanted to kill him,” Harry observed.
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t.”
Time flowed slow, then sudden, then slower. Twenty-one: moving into his own flat, Jean helping with boxes. Twenty-two: shadowing Kim as they traced a murder weapon across four wards and seventeen hands. Twenty-three: testifying with the architectured precision Kim had drilled into him.
At twenty-four he realized he no longer narrated himself in third person.
At twenty-five Jean said, almost gently, “You should do something about the urn.”
Kim echoed it in his way: unfinished things accumulate weight; weight unbalances.
Harry said nothing, but his gaze confessed intimate knowledge of pendulous burdens.
Cuno took Tuesday off，Tuesday, the day Cunoesse drove into the pond. He placed the urn in the passenger seat, like an interlocutor long silent, and returned to Martinaise.
The pond abided where geography had abandoned ambition, on the city’s frayed hem. Winter iced it over, all but a perfect circular breathing-hole three feet wide, as if water itself had decided to keep one eye open.
He parked, stepped onto the ice. Trust was the wrong word. Nothing about this place deserved trust,but the ice held. He crouched at the opening and peered in.
What he saw resembled a kaleidoscope inhaling its own colors: light turning through like water and ice, birthing geometries that violated the small logic of three dimensions. Patterns spiraled inward and outward simultaneously, hues unnamed by any language. The beauty bypassed aesthetics and jabbed something prehistoric in him that once understood splendor before the invention of speech.
He understood,just then,he understood why his sister had come here. She had seen this and wished to belong to it, to be a pattern not a person.
He lingered until cold seeped through uniform cloth, until silence grew thick enough to crystallize. And then—
He heard an engine catch behind him.